On this page: Interview with Philippe Grimbert; article from the Guardian by Emma Garman about Grimbert; article from the Ontario Review by Joyce Carol Oates about family secrets; article from the Guardian by Stuart Jeffries about Grimbert; suggestions for discussion of Memory

Philippe Grimbert (photograph: Sarah Lee)

Interview with Philippe Grimbert

Questions for the Author 1. The story depicted in Memory so closely resembles your own -- why did you choose to call it a novel rather than a memoir? I had no choice! My family history contained so many gaps that the novel (my favorite genre) was the only possible way of overcoming them. If I had been a historian, I would doubtless have chosen another way to explore this secret. And, paradoxically, creating a novel gave me an intimate sense of having re-established the truth of this personal, familial journey. 2. Constructing the narrative of a once-secret past seems to serve an important therapeutic function for the fictional Philippe. Was the process of writing this novel similarly therapeutic for you? How do you understand the relationship between writing and psychoanalysis? The narrator of Memory does take a journey that one could describe as therapeutic, in so far as he exorcises the ghosts of the past in order to become a proper adult subject, released from a guilt that didn't belong to him but whose weight he was nonetheless carrying. For me personally, it was not the writing of the novel itself that was therapeutic, but the psychoanalytic journey that I undertook as part of my training. My own analysis gave me the opportunity to consign my family history to its proper place, which is probably what allowed me, many years later, to write it with the necessary detachment. My work as a psychoanalyst enriches my writing on a daily basis -- not by drawing on my patients' stories (which I would never allow myself to do), but rather because it familiarizes me with the complexities of the human psyche, and the conflicts and contradictions within all of us. 3. Were there any parts of your own personal story that you omitted from this work? Any that you changed? If so, why? I left certain episodes from my own life out of the novel, not out of prudery but because I had come to the conclusion that they weren't necessary to the story I was attempting to construct. Other personal experiences had to be transformed, or subjected to the demands of the narrative: I whittled them down, sometimes drawing together into a single event experiences which had developed in a much more gradual, or less spectacular way. 4. What was your experience writing this book? Were certain parts of the story easier or more difficult to tell? It may seem strange for me to say that I enjoyed writing this book, and yet that's the truth: I was finally becoming the master of a story of which I had for so long been the dupe. The narrative was the easier part -- my real struggles were with the construction, the architecture of the story, the way it moves around in time, the passages of idealized versus real history. 5. In the novel you describe different stages of uncovering the past: the discovery of the toy dog, Louise's confessions, and years later an investigation into Hannah and Simon's ultimate fate. Do you feel that you now know the whole story? There will always be a secret component to this revealed secret, which I often compare to the Russian dolls that are nested inside each other: the final, smallest one always disappoints the child who tries in vain to open it. I think I have discovered the truth of this story more than its reality, but in any case, this psychological truth was more important to me than the historical reality. 6. How closely do Maxime and Tania resemble your real parents? Maxime and Tania resemble my real parents in terms of their journey, their quandary, and the way they fight against their family backgrounds. On the other hand, although they were indeed physically handsome and athletic, my real parents were not as preoccupied by their bodies and appearances as I have created them: that was a novelistic impulse which attracted me because of the way their inordinate passion for sport brought them together, as "stadium gods" who actually embodied the physical ideal of their persecutors -- an ambiguity that on a literary level I found both rich and disturbing. 7. Memory moves back and forth between the past and the present, the narrator's real life and his imagined one. Why did you structure the book this way? I constructed the novel around alternating real and imagined passages because that was exactly how I constructed myself -- which is in fact coherent with what Freud calls the "family romance," constructed at a certain point by every child, about his or her parents' history. 8. What do you like to read? Who are some of your favorite authors, why? Can you pick any one of them as being an inspiration for your works? My taste in literature is very classical -- Flaubert, Balzac, the great writers of the nineteenth century (which seems to me the golden age of the novel). In contemporary fiction, I am particularly fond of authors such Albert Cohen, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, and Erri De Lucca. Those who have served as models for me are those whose work is the most limpid, the subtlest. 9. What are you working on now? At the moment I am working on a new novel because, having written numerous articles on psychoanalysis, the joy I have discovered in writing novels seems to me unique! I am also finishing two adaptations for the theater -- my first novel, La petite robe de Paul, and a new adaptation of Anne Frank's Diary. http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=25&pid=586819&agid=8

Brother’s Keeper

Philippe Grimbert pretended he had an older sibling. The macabre reality was not far off.

by Emma Garman

When he was fifteen, Philippe Grimbert was told by a cousin that he was Jewish, not Catholic, that he had a half-brother who died before he was born, and that his parents’ marriage was founded upon tragedy—the burden of which would ultimately lead to their suicide. Forty years later, in 2003, the psychoanalyst, who lives outside Paris, began work on an autobiographical novel about these revelations, hoping to assuage his own grief and pay homage to his half-brother, who he discovered had died at Auschwitz. The last thing he expected was to write a bestseller. “I thought I had written an intimate book that would appeal to a small number of readers,” Grimbert explains in email. “The total opposite happened!”

He’s not exaggerating. An unexpected international sensation, Un Secret has sold 700,000 copies in France alone (more than double the sales of Michel Houellebecq’s last novel; the only literary work to have had similar success in France in recent years is another World War II novel by a Jewish author, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes1). Soon after Un Secret’s 2004 publication it became clear that this spare, unsentimental novel was hitting a nerve. Raves—“a very beautiful work, its content matching its form in their wondrous simplicity” (Figaro); “a splendid book that gives the unspeakable written form” (Le Monde)—were followed by awards: the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, the Prix des Lectrice d’Elle, and the Prix Wizo for the best work of Jewish interest in French literature. In the three years since, the novel has been translated into twenty-two languages, published in thirty-five countries, and adapted by director Claude Miller into an acclaimed movie now on the festival circuit. This month it finally arrives in U.S. bookstores under the title Memory.

Memory blends the author’s childhood recollections with an imaginative recreation of the shocking chain of circumstances that led to his birth, based on his knowledge of his family’s complicated background. “My personal drama was strewn with blanks to be filled,” says Grimbert, “and only creative writing could allow me to do this.” While the names have been changed and some details have been fictionalized, the central, agonizing events around which the novel revolves are real.

Those events begin in 1941, when Grimbert’s parents—renamed Tania and Maxime in the novel—escape Nazi-occupied Paris to the countryside of “Free France,” where they sit out the war in a farmhouse. They've long resisted their mutual attraction, as they are siblings-in-law: Maxime is married to Hannah—Tania’s husband’s sister—with whom he has a son, Simon. But Hannah and little Simon are apprehended en route to joining the family in their hideout and deported, and Tania’s husband, a soldier, dies in a POW camp, and the obstacles to Tania and Maxime’s love fall away, though at an unfathomable price. Desire, for these two, becomes inseparable from guilt: “He is holding in his arms the woman he has wanted for years, but as he falls towards sleep it is Hannah’s face that comes to him. He pushes her away as hard as he can, driving her bright face back into the darkness.”

Back in Paris after the war, Philippe is born and Maxime changes the family name, Grinberg, to Grimbert, “washed clean of its ‘n’ and ‘g,’ those letters that had become harbingers of death.” Philippe's parents also expunge their personal histories, never mentioning their previous marriages, or the existence of Simon. Passing as gentile, they even have Philippe christened—“so late that I could still remember it all”—and he naturally assumes that his parents have only ever been married to each other. Pale, weak, and sickly—a disappointment to his muscular father—Philippe imagines a strong and handsome older brother, of whom he is both in awe and painfully jealous, unaware that this archetypal figure once existed. At first benevolent and comforting, this nameless companion turns threatening as Philippe gets older: “From protective, he had become tyrannical, mocking, even contemptuous. I nevertheless continued to tell him my fears and failings as I fell asleep to the rhythm of his breathing.”

For a long time this ghostly presence is the only significant manifestation of a buried past. But when Philippe has just turned fifteen, his class at school is shown a Holocaust documentary, which triggers in him a disconcerting sense of identification—and a hitherto untapped strength. When his neighbor, the captain of the football team, “imitated a German accent, saying: ‘Ach! Jewish dogs!” . . . I laughed until I felt sick. Suddenly my stomach lurched, I thought I was going to throw up and before I knew what I was doing I had slapped him hard across the face.” The boys fall on the ground and fight, Philippe managing to “damage his nose quite seriously,” he’s pleased to note. The episode prompts a family friend—a fictional stand-in for Grimbert’s cousin, and the only character who didn’t exist in reality—to reveal the past, as she understands that protecting Philippe from knowledge is not protecting him from suffering. “She owed me the truth,” says the book's hero. Grimbert’s own childhood taught him, he says, that “a child from whom one hides a secret guesses part of it, knows it unconsciously and that the truth, when it is finally revealed, causes a double response in him, of stupor and at the same time familiarity that could be summed up as: ‘deep down I always knew it.’”

The novel reads like a case study of transgenerational haunting, the notion that unspoken trauma is heritable. Perhaps this, more than its particular portrayal of the historical plight of French Jews, accounts for Un Secret’s runaway success in France: It’s hardly surprising that a country whose intellectual heroes include Lacan and Derrida would respond so enthusiastically to a narrative that could only have been constructed by a psychoanalyst. Grimbert’s career choice was the inevitable result of the revelations he received as a fifteen-year-old, as the novel makes explicit: “I now knew where I came from. Relieved of the load that I had weighing on my shoulders I had turned it into strength, and would do the same with those who came to see me.”

In the novel, the first person Philippe helps is his father, who he recognizes is unraveling under the burden of his guilt. At the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, in the traditionally Jewish Marais district, Philippe looks through deportation records and learns that Hannah and Simon were gassed the day after they arrived at Auschwitz. He tells Maxime “the number of the convoy, the date his wife and son left for Auschwitz, and the date they died.” Maxime’s reaction, though wordless, assures Philippe that he’s done the right thing: “I had just relieved my father of his secret.” When Grimbert made this discovery in real life, he knew he had no choice to but to share it, as “the truth, as horrible as it is, was undoubtedly less cruel than anything he may for years have been imagining about their everyday life in the concentration camp.”

Grimbert speculates that the novel’s dramatization of the power of the unknown may also be a reason for its popularity; the theme of secrecy “echoes in each one of us.” His allusive, spare, elliptical prose reproduces the feeling of hidden nightmares, and evokes the uncertainty of reconstructing one’s life anew with only partial information—a process undergone by Philippe within the story, and by the author in writing the book. “What is paradoxical,” he remarks, “is that often, after having created a particular fictional episode, I had an inner conviction that I’d discovered the truth of this episode. In short, it was via fiction that I arrived at the reality of the facts.”

Grimbert has deliberately taken creative license, however, by contrasting the parents’ vigor (they're represented as swimmers with “two superb bodies, fit from athletic discipline”) with the boy’s bookishness. It was his intention, he said, “to create a kind of tension by drawing a parallel between the physical ideal of Maxime and Tania and that of the Nazis, this Aryan myth of ‘the gods of the stadium.’ In the same way the physique of the narrator connected, on the other hand, with the victims of Nazism, his thinness evoked that of the deportees, like an unconscious identification with the sufferings of his brother—a kind of return of the repressed.” After Philippe discovers the truth about his family’s past, he blossoms physically: “My chest had broadened, the hole in my solar plexus had vanished, as if the truth had until then been written there in hollows.”

Rescued from his haunting as a young man, Grimbert hadn't contemplated writing about his family’s story, either as a psychoanalyst or as a novelist until one day, when he was out walking with his daughter, they happened to pass through a pet cemetery near his home in Seine-et-Marne, and he noticed a grave for the dog that had belonged to the daughter of the former Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval. Remembering how Laval had endorsed the deportation of children like his brother, who had been denied the dignity of a grave, Grimbert was overcome by rage and resolved in that moment to write his novel. The result is both a poignant contribution to Holocaust literature and the tragic tale of a couple whose personal history was, as Grimbert puts it, “intertwined with History with a capital H.

Emma Garman is a writer living in London. She last wrote about the French novelist Romain Gary http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/print.html?id=780 Copyright  The Guardian (London, England) (March 26, 2001): 

From The Ontario Review by Joyce Carol Oates

All families harbour secrets; you might say that families conspire in secrets. Children are not told, yet somehow, without being told, children "know". I had always known there was something mysterious about my mother's childhood, but I would never have asked, out of daughterly shyness and respect.

My family has always been close, yet we can't speak of our closeness. There is an intimacy of emotion that seems to make language impossible. To say "I love you", for some people, is the most difficult act.

I had agreed to "interview" my mother for an anthology of women writers writing about their mothers, but months passed and I was unable to begin. I felt paralysed, frustrated. Then, one night, away from home in a hotel room in New York City, and feeling lonely, I impulsively dialled my parents' number. It was relatively late - 10pm. This would not be one of my usual calls, made during the day.

Immediately, the tone of our conversation was different. At the time my mother was 81 and my father, now deceased, was 83. In their long marriage, my father was always dominant. He would be dominant, in fact, until his death (in May 2000). My mother's independence was always subordinate to Daddy's wishes, yet she loved him very much, I know, and would say that the sacrifice was worth it. Or so I hope.

They were married 63 years.

That evening, I spoke only briefly with Daddy. This conversation was to be exclusively between Mom and me.

"Mom, I'm supposed to 'interview' you. I'd like to ask about your childhood." This was my awkward, shy beginning. And my mother was awkward and shy in speaking. She'd only gone to eighth grade, in a one-room rural school in the 1920s, and though she was intelligent and loved to read, she had little confidence in her ability to articulate her thoughts.

She said, suddenly: "Well, you know, Joyce - my mother didn't want me. When I was a baby. My mother gave me away. I used to cry a lot, I was so ashamed. My mother didn't want me." Mom was speaking in a rush of words, which was unlike her.

I was stunned by this revelation. Though I suppose, in retrospect, I should not have been surprised. For always there had been vague rumours about my mother's background; she had been "adopted" by her mother's younger sister, who had been unable to have children; the only grandparents I knew were my adoptive grandparents, on whose farm in Millersport, New York, my family lived.

During the course of our faltering, sometimes tearful conversation that evening, the story emerged: my mother's father was killed at the age of 44 in a tavern fight and because there were nine children in the family, my mother, six months old, was "given away" by her desperate mother. These were Hungarian immigrants living in the Black Rock section of Buffalo, New York, in 1916, very poor but determined to acquire land and become farmers in America as they had been in Hungary.

As my mother spoke, she became more and more emotional. She began to cry, repeating the words: "My mother didn't want me" as if the wound were fresh in her heart; as if her mother had given her away the previous week, not 80 years before. I felt helpless, unable to console her. But in person, at home, this conversation would probably not have occurred. Daddy would have been present; it would have been a "social" visit. Something about the neutrality of the telephone and the geographical distance between us, and perhaps even the unusual lateness of the hour, allowed my mother to confide in me as if, somehow, we were sisters, not mother and daughter. I came to realise that the prevailing fact of my mother's life, unknown to my brother and me, perhaps to everyone in the family, was that she'd been "given away" as an infant; she had never known her father, had been forbidden to ask about her father, and believed that her mother hadn't wanted her.

It was a moment of astounding, profoundly disconcerting insight. I realised that, at the age of 81, this warm, loving, always selfless and good-humoured woman, who had been such an exceptional mother, was somehow still a child herself. Like a child, she felt lonely, frightened, baffled, ashamed. It seemed clear now that one of the reasons my mother has been such a warm presence is that she knows the anxiety of loss; the feelings of worthlessness that derive from not having a mother who loves you, and not even knowing your father.

Instinctively, my mother knew how crucial it is to touch, to hug, to kiss. Though she could not articulate love in words, she embodied it. For decades, she sewed and knitted beautiful clothes, in a variety of rich, striking fabrics and colours, as a testament to her love for others.

I was deeply moved by my mother's story and think of it every day of my life. It seems to me, still, a mystery; a riddle. I will always hear my elderly mother saying, in a small, hurt voice: "My mother didn't want me." As if this fact were a judgment on her and not on the adults of her childhood.

Eventually I would fashion my mother's story into a poetic monologue, with her permission. She had been present at a performance of this stage piece (When I Was A Little Girl And My Mother Didn't Want Me) and was fascinated by the actress's interpretation. (By this time, my mother had come to know that such "adoptions" were not uncommon among poor immigrant families in the US in the early years of the 20th century and that her experience was neither unique nor "shameful".)

From this revelation, I came to understand that we are all, despite our ages, identities, professional achievements and alliances, a single age. In some secret part of their souls, our parents are still children requiring the love of parents long deceased, as we, in adulthood, are still the children of our parents, vulnerable and exposed to their emotions. Never again would I think of either of my parents in quite the same way. Never again would I assume that I "know" anyone fully - including myself. om The Ontario

This article first appeared in O Magazine. Snapshots: Mothers and Daughters, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Janet Berliner, is published by Vintage at pounds 7.99.

Twenty years after his parents jumped from the window of their Parisian apartment to their deaths, Philippe Grimbert decided to write about the secret that had overwhelmed their lives. "I had been in mourning for those 20 years," says the French psychoanalyst, "which is a lot more than Freud suggests is normal. During that time I couldn't do anything but mourn or try to deal with what had happened on the analyst's couch. There was no way I could imagine writing about it. The past weighed too heavily on my shoulders."

But then the secret his mother and father had attempted to keep from their son was unusual. "In fact, it wasn't so much one secret as a series of secrets," says Grimbert, "all of them eventually knitting together into a huge patchwork."

The first secret Philippe's parents had hidden from him was the fact that he had a half-brother. "I found out about that when I was 15 from a cousin who inadvertently told me. I had always been told I was an only child, but I always had a sense that I had a brother. When I found out about Michel's existence, it was almost a relief, a confirmation of what I had always known."

The cousin revealed that Philippe's father, Lucien, had been married to another woman before the war. What is more, Lucien and his first wife had had a son, Michel. But the boy and his mother were deported to Auschwitz during the war and were gassed. Lucien, however, managed to escape from German occupation in Paris to "Free France". There, he and some relatives holed up in a farm house.

But the story gets more complicated as the shameful secrets multiply. At that farmhouse, tucked away in a rustic area of southern France and seemingly a million miles from the war and its death camps, Lucien consummated his desire for a beautiful woman who had for years driven him wild with lust - even as his wife and child were being taken to their deaths. The woman he lusted after would become Lucien's second wife and Philippe's mother. At the time, though, she was already married - to his wife's brother. She was, in fact, his sister-in- law. And her husband, his wife's brother, was a soldier in the French army who was to die in a prison camp. The war thus created an opportunity for the couple to consummate their desires - desires which, Grimbert suggests, were made more intense by the feelings of grief for their missing spouses and by their guilt at feeling so aroused in such extraordinary circumstances. No wonder, one might think, that Grimbert became a shrink.

"The story of my mother and father's romance under the shadow of war, in all its beauty, is also the story of the horror of their desire, which forgets everything in order to appease itself," he says.

What Grimbert wrote - 20 years after his parents killed themselves, leaving no note - was neither memoir nor history, but a novel in which he imagined, among other things, the transgressive desire his mother and father felt for each other in those war years. The result is a book, entitled Un Secret, that has become a runaway bestseller in France with more than 180,000 copies sold, winning both the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens and the Prix Wizo for the best work of Jewish interest in French literature. It is now published in Britain, entitled Secret, and Portobello Books are marketing it as something akin to other short, shattering Holocaust-related fictions - Bernard Schlink's The Reader and Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces - and suggesting that the book is as economic and tense as Michael Haneke's film Hidden.

In the book, Grimbert, 58, imagines how his parents made love for the first time - a disturbing business for anyone to occupy themselves with, but especially so in Grimbert's case. His father has been inconsolable since he has learned that his wife and son have been arrested. One day he and Philippe's mother go for a walk to the river where she removes her dress, climbs on to a pier and dives into the water. His desire for her, temporarily obliterated by grief, starts up anew. "The sight of this black arrow silhouetted against the black sky reawakens his desire. The vice loosens and he weeps for the first time." His desire and his grief are thus inextricable.

In the next scene, his father creeps into his mother's bed, unable initially to do anything but cling to her body. Only later will he manage to (as Grimbert quaintly puts it in the book) "take her" while his relatives lie asleep on the other side of thin walls. He tries not to cry out in his passion: "The effort of controlling himself will make it 10 times more pleasurable." Desire and culpability are for ever linked in Grimbert's imaginative world.

But why did Philippe's half brother, Michel, go to his death with his mother? A few pages earlier in the novel, Grimbert imagines how the son and mother were captured and sent to the camps. They are in a cafe close to the border when officials arrive and ask to see the patrons' papers. But the mother does not give the false papers that would ensure her and her son's safe passage to her waiting husband. Instead, she reaches into the bottom of her bag and there finds the real papers that disclose their Jewishness. Suicidally, she hands them over. They are arrested immediately. Why did his (fictional) mother do something so self destructive? Grimbert supplies the motive: "She had known about how her husband lusted after the other woman."

To be sure, such imaginative reconstructions of the motives of long dead people are tendentious to say the least, but they were, Grimbert says, essential for him in making sense of what happened in the years before his birth (he was born in Paris, in 1948). Why, I ask him, did he write a novel that would involve fictionalising real events? "Because I had no choice. For me, in reconstituting this story that was so brief in terms of what I had been told, reconstituting it in all its duration, was all I could do. My sole tool was the novel. Perhaps someone else could have made a film, done a painting. Somebody else could have written a history, but I couldn't. The only way I could pay homage was to write this book."

What was it that finally unleashed the book, 20 years after his parents' suicides? "One summer's evening, I walked into a cemetery for dogs with my daughter. It was just a few hundred metres from my home in Seine-et-Marne. There I found all these tombstones to dead dogs with loving inscription in stone. I realised that one consequence of the secrets my parents kept was that the dead - my half-brother and his mother - had been erased. They had never been remembered properly."

Then he noticed that one of the tombstones was for a dog that had belonged to Pierre Laval, the prime minister of Vichy France, who was instrumental in ensuring that many Jews were arrested by French gendarmes and deported to Nazi death camps. Laval's actions also ensured that many Jewish children died. "In his trial in 1945, he said in his defence that he had encouraged the deportation of children who were under 16 in order that families were not separated. He said that!"

The thought that even Pierre Laval's dogs were being honoured in death outraged Grimbert - and released his imagination. He speaks of his brain "flowering" with long-dormant reflections on his family history after that cemetery visit, and in fact the book that resulted was originally entitled The Cemetery of Dogs. "My publishers liked the book, but they didn't like the title. They thought a book with the words 'cemetery' and 'dogs' in the title wouldn't sell. Instead, they said it should be called Un Secret." From the start, he conceived the book as "un tombeau" to his half- brother. In French, "tombeau" means both tomb and homage. What does his family think of the book? "I have no family now," he says. "They are all dead." [He means he has no older relatives: he does have a wife and children.] That must have given him greater freedom, when writing? "You might think so. But it also made me more responsible. I was the only one left to memorialise them."

In the book, the fictional Philippe is a pallid weakling, a bookish wimp with a toy dog for a best friend. Philippe the wimp's existence is a constant rebuke to his father, who is forever pumping iron and subduing wrestling opponents with his stout thighs; Philippe's mother, meanwhile, is a lithe diver. The son who died in Auschwitz was the one his father wanted. Philippe is a disappointment.

Is this all true? "Well, my father certainly had parallel bars in our flat and liked weightlifting, but it was my idea to make my parents into sporting gods in the book. Jews are supposed to be hollow chested, feeble. But to make my parents sporty and obsessed with their physical prowess seemed to me an interesting thing to do. They were Jews, but they seem like Aryans at the very moment the Aryans are coming to kill them."

Grimbert insists that only one character in the book has no real- life parallel. Instead of having a cousin disclosing the family secrets, the novel has a friend called Louise whom the little Philippe befriends and from whom he learns about his family's secret history. He is forgiving, now, of his parents and all the secrets they kept from him - for example, they let him grow up thinking he was a Catholic. "I now think that what they did was an act of love rather than cowardice. They sought to protect themselves and me by doing these things. But discovering that I was really a Jew and not a Catholic made me into a neurotic and then into a shrink."

Grimbert studied psychology at Nanterre, and spent a dozen years in Lacanian analysis before starting his own practice. He now divides his time between that practice, working at a medical institute for autistic adolescents, composing music and writing books. The books include two novels and several jaunty psychoanalytical texts. Only Secret, so far, has been translated.

Whether the others will be too depends on the novel being as successful here and in the US as it was in France. Across the Channel, Grimbert's novel has become something of an industry: next month, Claude Miller's new film adaptation of Un Secret is set to be one of the French nominations for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Miller, the veteran director whose movies include La Petite Voleuse, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, has just finished filming and his movie, to be released in France this year, will star Mathieu Amalric as the adult Philippe, with Julie Depardieu (Gerard's daughter) as the family friend who tells the young Philippe the truth about his past. It will be interesting in particular to see how the film depicts the relationship between Philippe's father and his second wife, who will be played by Patrick Bruel and Cecile de France: in the novel, Grimbert accentuates their athleticism so much that they sound like escapees from a Leni Riefenstahl film.

Does Grimbert have any fears for how his book will be received? "I suppose my one fear for the book is that people will think this is another book about the Holocaust and haven't we had enough already. My hope is that the telling of the story is more than a Holocaust memoir, but says something more about family history and secrets."

It certainly does these things, but the novel has many passages focusing on Jewish identity before, during and after the Holocaust. In the book, Philippe's father is not proud to be a Jew. "I can understand that alienation," says Grimbert. "He wasn't religious, nor am I. He had no particular cultural affiliations with other Jews. He felt himself to be French. But once you strip away those things, what is left? To be a Jew is to be persecuted? I can well imagine my father rejecting that. Define myself as being persecuted? No thanks."

Towards the end of the book, Grimbert imag ines how his parents died. He imagines that his father could not bear to see his wife, whose diver's body was once so lithe and athletic, deteriorate physically. To see her use a crutch is intolerable. He writes: "With his arm around his wife's waist, he had helped her to stand up and gently walked her over to the living-room balcony, for one last dive." It's a suicide that recalls others: the death of Parisian philosopher Gilles Deleuze who threw himself from his apartment window while suffering from incurable lung cancer; but more pertinently that of Primo Levi, who fell in his Turin apartment in 1985. Levi's death led his fellow holocaust survivor Sir Elie Wiesel to say at the time that "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later".

Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suppose that Grimbert's parents' suicides were not just prompted by fear of physical deterioration, but happened because they, like Levi, were scarred by the fact that they had eluded the gas chambers. Given their story and their secret, it would be surprising if it were otherwise. In Grimbert's novel, it is surely significant that his father's body is cremated. He writes: "My father, according to his wishes, was reunited with [his first wife and their son] in a column of black smoke drifting out of the crematorium's chimneys."

But before writing his parents' deaths, Grimbert allows himself to imagine another scene. Philippe, having learned about the existence of his brother, does some research to find out the date and circumstances of his murder at Auschwitz - something his father has never done. Then Philippe tells his father and mother all the details and a mutual burden is lifted. "It didn't happen quite like that," says Grimbert, "but I wish it had."

It's a shattering scene, one in which Philippe discloses to his father that he has found out all the things his parents have sought to conceal, and also one in which he tells his father something that he does not know. "I had just," writes Grimbert, "relieved my father of his secret" *

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/03/fiction.news

Discussion suggestions for Memory A leader may wish to use some of the following questions should they be of interest

The original title for the book was Un Secret. Which title, A Secret or Memory do you think is a better title for the book and why?

What did you think about the book's structure, presenting imagined and realistic scenes in non-chronological order?

How does the young Philippe compose his life narrative with the few facts he knows?

Do you see any literary value in the way Grimbert uses the past and present tenses?

What is Hannah's motivation for revealing her papers, which were stamped Juden, to the police? Once identified as Jewish, why does she tell the policemen that Simon is her son ?

How did you feel about Louisa telling Philippe the real story about his family history?

Why do you think Louisa believed Philippe was ready to hear the story?

Why do you think the young Philippe acted so violently to the boy in his class?

Grimbert emphasized his parents' athleticism and physical beauty. How did the emphasis on these qualities reflect the Nazi culture ?

One could place Hannah and Simon's tragedy at the feet of Maxime and Tania. However, were there no war and Maxime and Tania fell in love, would the consequences be different and might they not be as tragic?

How does Maxime demonstrate his feelings about his Jewish heritage?

What identity did Maxime create for himself? How does the young Philippe see himself? How does Hannah see herself?

What sort of adult does Philippe become and how does he feel about and deal with his parents?

Why do you think Maxime and Tania committed suicide?

What role do dogs play in the story?

How do guilt and sex interwine in the book?

Memory has many strong images. Which ones remain with you?

Why do families have secrets?

How do secrets in a family affect the members, particularly the children?